Form and Methods: Thirty Scenes, Songs and Languages
Before Gupta’s story reaches its final image, the audience has already been trained to read it in a very particular way. The Empress is not one continuous story but a cutting between short scenes, songs and shifting locations, held together as a single restless picture. The commentary to the play calls this a “visual and textual mosaic.” Understanding this mosaic structure matters for the written paper, because one compulsory question links design and context and/or theatrical conventions — and this play’s method of storytelling is itself a theatrical convention worth naming.
The play is built from thirty scenes across two acts, fifteen scenes in each act. Act One, headed “1887”, has an extra scene wedged in: Scene Four B, sitting between Scene Four and Scene Five. Act Two moves forward in dated jumps rather than a steady clock — 1891, 1892, 1897, 1900 and finally 1901. Very few scenes run longer than two or three pages before the action cuts away completely.
The play is structured as two acts of fifteen scenes each (thirty scenes total), with an extra Scene Four B inserted into Act One between Scenes Four and Five. Act Two is dated in jumps (1891, 1892, 1897, 1900, 1901) rather than moving continuously.
This speed comes from cross-cutting. Act One repeatedly cuts between Tilbury docks and Windsor Castle: Rani is dismissed at the docks in Scene Four, then the very next scene — Scene Four B — shows Abdul arriving at Windsor as Sir John Tyler’s Jubilee presentation. Neither character knows about the other’s scene, but the audience is invited to compare a woman thrown out of service with a man just being welcomed into it, on the very same afternoon of empire.
Some scenes go further still, becoming a genuine split scene: two actions given to the audience simultaneously, inside the same scene number. Act One Scene Ten intercuts Lord Oakham’s dinner table with Hari writing a letter by candlelight at sea. Act One Scene Twelve shows a storm on Hari’s ship at the same time as a heavily pregnant Rani with four children, and Dadabhai at his desk. Act One Scene Fifteen shows Abdul teaching Victoria Hindi in the very same beat that Rani places her newborn on the docks and walks away. Act Two Scene Eleven shows Victoria dressed for the Diamond Jubilee while Dadabhai delivers his Commons speech about famine and plague. Each pairing forces the audience to hold two moral weights in their head at once.
In Act Two Scene Nine, Rani sits on a park bench with Firoza, reading aloud from Hari’s letters, while — in a different space on the same stage — Victoria sits alone, reflecting on her own situation. The commentary is direct about what this staging achieves: “They will never meet.” The two women’s parallel lives, one as an empress and one as a former ayah, are set in conversation for the audience without ever touching inside the plot.
As a performer, you might play Rani’s stillness as active concentration — leaning into Firoza, her voice softening on the sad passages of Hari’s letters — while the actor playing Victoria holds a rigid upright posture, staring at nothing, her hands still in her lap. As a designer, you could isolate each woman in her own lighting special — a warm, low fresnel wash over the bench, and a cold, tighter special on Victoria — so the two pools of light never overlap on the floor, visually confirming that the two women never cross paths.
The play is also structured through a sequence of songs printed in the play text — a Clan Line parody, the ‘Lascar rap’, the ‘Shanty rap’, ‘Cast adrift the starlight’, the work song ‘Eki Dumah’, Kipling’s verse set to music and ‘A promise made’ — several of them with lyrics credited to Dom Coyote. According to the commentary, calling for music and song at all was director Emma Rice’s initiative, since she saw them as a powerful vehicle to reinforce the transcultural dynamics of the play. The original production mixed idioms directly, using “a punk rock sitar player and the opening song as a lascar rap.”
A sequence of songs is printed in the play text, several credited to Dom Coyote. Calling for music and song at all was Emma Rice’s directorial initiative — used to reinforce the play’s cross-cultural argument, not just to entertain.
Language works the same way as the songs: it interrupts naturalism to make a political point audible. Rani counts in Bengali on the ship. Lascar Sally curses fluently in Hindi. Abdul teaches Victoria Hindi phrases late in the play, printed with their English translations beside them. Urdu and Arabic greetings — salaam, shukria, adaab — and the Sanskrit namaste appear throughout. Every foreign phrase in the text is printed with its meaning attached, so a design or performance choice never needs to guess at translation: the play already tells you what is being said and to whom.
Gupta and the original production held two different theatrical modes together. The commentary describes the writing as working in a naturalistic idiom — individual scenes of dialogue that feel psychologically real. But the overall shape of the play — thirty short scenes, songs, cross-cutting, split staging — is presentational. Emma Rice described the piece as a “big, sprawling, epic piece” and said she had thought hard about how to avoid creating a “costume drama”, aware of a genuine risk that overplaying stereotyped exoticism could undermine the play’s political impact.
A frequent misunderstanding is to treat every scene as if it belongs to a single continuous, realistic world — blocking every entrance and exit as if characters could see and hear each other across scenes. That flattens the play’s actual method. A strong answer recognises that Gupta and the original production used cutting, song and split staging deliberately, to force comparisons the plot itself never makes.
For example, in Act One Scene Twelve, if a designer plays the storm at sea, the pregnant Rani, and Dadabhai’s desk as three sealed-off box sets with blackouts between them, the audience loses the point of the pairing. A stronger design choice keeps a permanent multi-level set — ship rigging suggested upstage, a domestic platform mid-stage, a desk downstage — with lighting states shifting focus between them without ever fully hiding the others, so the audience holds all three images in view at once, exactly as the mosaic structure intends.
The commentary describes the original 2013 design in detail. Black and white film was projected onto canvas and gauze, including archive footage of the Diamond Jubilee procession and atmospheric shots of the sea, forming a moving backdrop behind smaller, jewelled scenes staged on platforms of different levels. The commentary summarises the effect: “Britain was symbolically presented as a tiny island in a heaving and billowing imperial sea.” Colour was used to heighten effects — notably, the commentary notes, in the contrast between Rani and the Queen.
The play does not demand this scale, however. A 2019 production at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama used far less music and far simpler sets and costumes. According to the commentary, that spareness actually intensified the play’s political argument rather than weakening it. This matters for staging questions: a convincing answer does not need a full RSC-scale production to be effective — a stripped-back design can sharpen the same ideas.